Lee Herrick is the author of two books, Gardening Secrets of the Dead and This Many Miles from Desire, and his poems appear widely in literary magazines, textbooks and anthologies, including Columbia Poetry Review, The Normal School, Visions Across the Americas, and Indivisible: Poems of Social Justice, among others. Born in Daejeon, Korea, and adopted at 10 months old, he is a Fresno Poet Laureate Emeritus and teaches at Fresno City College and the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College.
This November, to recognize and honor National Adoption Awareness Month, I've invited adoptee poet Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello to curate a folio of poems by 10 Asian American adoptees. This page features Lee Herrick's poem, "Sun." I invite you to take a moment to read her moving introduction to the folio here, as well as the other nine poems in this collection.
— Eugenia Leigh, Poetry Editor
For the new year, we give you two of Lee Herrick’s delightful poems—necessary fist-in-the-air anthems of hope because though you can’t “echolocate like a bat,” “you are one of many species who can whistle.” May any scars from “the nasty hell of your difficult year” serve as powerful reminders of “the bright chorus of your own survival.” May 2017 indeed be a year in which “everything / aligns as it should.”
— Eugenia Leigh, Poetry Editor
Echolocation
What a miracle it would be
to echolocate like a bat,